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Tambrands Ads Try to Scale
Cultural, Religious Obstacles

By

Yumiko Ono Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated March 17, 1997 12:01 a.m. ET

For years,
Tambrands
has faced a delicate hurdle selling Tampax tampons in Brazil: Many young women fear they'll lose their virginity if they use a tampon. When they go to the beach in tiny bikinis, tampons aren't their choice. Instead, hordes of women use pads and gingerly wrap a sweater around their waist.

Now, the No. 1 tampon maker hopes a bold new ad campaign will help change the mind-set of Brazilian women.

"Of course, you're not going to lose your virginity," reassures one cheerful Brazilian woman in a new television ad, which starts airing Monday. Another woman chimes in: "That will happen, in a much more romantic way."

Tambrands' risky new ads in Brazil are just part of a high-stakes campaign to expand into overseas markets where it has long faced cultural and religious sensitivities. The new ads feature local women talking surprisingly bluntly about such a personal product. In China, another challenging market for Tambrands, a new ad shows a Chinese woman inserting a tampon into a test tube filled with blue water. "No worries about leakage," declares another.

"In any country, there are boundaries of acceptable talk. We want to go just to the left of that," says Nanette Koryn, group creative director of Foote, Cone & Belding's New York office, which is creating Tambrands' $65 million ad campaign world-wide. "We want them to think, they have not heard frankness like this before."

In the next three months, FCB, a unit of Chicago's
True North Communications
, plans to launch new Tampax ads in 26 foreign countries and the U.S.

Tambrands' new ads are a big shift from most feminine-protection-product ads, which often show frisky women dressed in white pants biking or turning cartwheels, while discreetly pushing messages of comfort. Tambrands itself showed more cautious ads before: a recent Brazilian ad shows a close-up of a tampon while the narrator chirps, "It's sleek, smooth and really comfortable to use."

But the stakes are high for Tambrands, because tampons are basically all it sells. And in the U.S., which currently generates 45% of Tambrands' sales, the company is mired in competition with such rivals as
Playtex Products Inc.
What's more, new users are hard to get because 70% of women already use tampons. In the 52 weeks ended Feb. 22, Tambrands' U.S. sales fell 0.6% to $335.8 million, according to A.C. Nielsen.

In the overseas market, however, Tambrands officials talk glowingly of a huge opportunity: only 100 million of the 1.7 billion menstruating women in the world currently use tampons, they say.

The ad blitz follows a big marketing overhaul at Tambrands last year that divides the world into three clusters, based not on geography, but on how resistant women are to using tampons. The goal is to market to each cluster in a similar way.

Most women in Cluster One, including the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia, already use tampons and may feel they know all they need to know about the product. In Cluster Two, which include countries such as France, Israel and South Africa, about 50% of women use tampons. Some concerns about virginity remain and tampons are often considered unnatural products that block the flow. Tambrands' strategy: use gynecologists' endorsements to stress scientific research on tampons.

Potentially the most lucrative -- but infinitely more challenging -- group is Cluster Three, which include huge countries like Brazil, China and Russia. There, along with tackling the virginity issue, Tambrands must also tell women how to use a tampon without making them feel squeamish.

While the advertising messages differ widely from country to country, Tambrands is also trying to create a more consistent image for its Tampax tampons. The ads in each country show consecutive shots of women declaring their tampon message outside, some clutching a blue box of Tampax. They end with the same tagline, "Tampax. Women know."

While marketing consultants say Tambrands' strategy is a step in the right direction, some caution that tampons are one of the most difficult products to market world-wide.

"The greatest challenge in the global expansion of tampons is to address the religious and cultural mores that suggest that vaginal insertion is fundamentally prohibited by culture," says Jeffrey Hill, managing director of Meridian Consulting Group in Westport, Conn. "The third market [cluster] looks like the great frontier of tampons, but it could be the seductive noose of the global expansion objective."

Janey Loyd, a Tambrands spokeswoman, says the company is aware that even within Cluster Three, cultural and religious barriers vary. While the company's sales are increasing in some countries like Russia, Tambrands isn't targeting Muslim countries, she says.

While Tambrands gears up for international expansion, it is also increasing ad spending in its mainstay U.S. market. Its new focus: encouraging women to use tampons overnight. Using the Cluster One approach of pitching to an already educated and jaded audience, a new ad that airs Monday tries to tease women with a provocative question: "Should I sleep with it, or not?"

Ad Notes... .

NEW AD ACCOUNT:Phillips-Van Heusen
said it has handed advertising responsibility for its Bass, Gant, Izod and Van Heusen brands to
Omnicom
's TBWA International. Phillips-Van Heusen spokesman Henry Justus said that apart from certain retail ads, the brands hadn't received any national advertising support for more than a year. Ad spending for the brands is expected to total between $35 and $40 million in 1997 and to climb to nearly $50 million in 1998, the companies said.